Website - Stumbleupon.com

Opened - April 13, 2007

PR - 8

Alexa - 359

StumbleUpon Says:

"StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click  Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 6 million+ other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like (thumbs up) automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend."

Dave Earley Says:

StumbleUpon has grown extremely popular and is a very user friendly site.  At almost 2 years old, StumbleUpon has a nice PR8 and a very good Alexa traffic rank.  In StumbleUpon members are known as stumblers, and stumbling is what they do, which is basically website submission.  

When you add a website to StumbleUpon, it is automatically given a thumbs up and you are able to add a review (description), along with relevant tags (keywords).  Keywords are important in any form of marketing, but in StumbleUpon there's more to that.  Stumblers identify their likes and dislikes in StumbleUpon, which means that any time they are surfing through StumbleUpon they might come upon your submission if it matches their interests.  

Traffic has been recorded by many Stumblers, however, looks can be deceiving.  I've had 1,000's of recorded visits from StumbleUpon based on a single submission, and others have recorded 10,000's of visitors from any one post.  

How likely is this?  

Even using a traffic exchange this kind of traffic is improbable at best.  You may see the results, but do you see any conversions, or any other reason to believe that this traffic is actually real?  

I believe this traffic is a manipulation from the StumbleUpon toolbar.  Much like in a traffic exchange where members surf through sites for credits, viewing any given site for as much as 10 seconds, if that, stumblers may also surf through StumbleUpon and the results may be recorded by your analytics.  

How many conversions do your record?  Do you have 5,000 comments to go along with 40,000 visitors, or 10,000 thumbs up to go along with those visitors?  If not, I would surely second guess the value of the StumbleUpon traffic, and any direct traffic recorded by the analytics.  

While direct traffic may be overrated in StumbleUpon, it is possible to obtain organic traffic from the search engines because backlinks in StumbleUpon do come up as "dofollow".  Organic traffic is always a plus, and cannot be overrated because it is coming straight from the search engines based on keywords that your site is getting hit for.  StumbleUpon is another social site that appears to be more for the fun of it, as stumblers glance at websites and love to see more photos and things of that nature.  The "dofollow" backlinks are definitely a nice advantage, but I wouldn't brag about any direct traffic results coming my way.  

The Social Media Marketing Report for StumbleUpon  Copyright © Dave Earley 2009

About the Author:

Dave Earley works from home as an internet entrepreneur and excels in the area of social media marketing.  Submit your articles to this site by registering, logging in and choosing submit an article.  Also feel free to join in the marketing discussion over at the forum.  

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The Social Media Marketing Report for Mixx

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Get More Targeted Traffic by Getting Social

Why Social Media Marketing is More Popular Than Paris Hilton

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